خلاصة:
Questions about the metaphysics of causation may be usefully divided into questions about the objects that are causally related, and questions about the causal relations themselves. For instance, is causation merely a physical concept? What is the connection between causation and probability? According to Wesley Salmon, an analysis of causation in terms of physical and causal relations of propensity is possible. But he replaces the notion of necessity with what he calls propensity. This approach to causality is consistent with a probabilistic approach. Another approach would be to reduce such relations to the physical causation. These questions should be resolved. As it turns out, in order to resolve these fundamental and metaphysical disputes, we can turn to a concept of causation that has been discussed within the Islamic philosophy. This approach treats causality as a rational and philosophical notion, and, in contrast to the probabilistic approach, it retains the necessity of causal relations.
ملخص الجهاز:
Causation, Causal Mechanisms Model, Metaphysical Concept, Necessity of Cause and Effect, Determinism ____________________________________________________________________ 1 PhD Candidate of Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy of Science, Sharif University, Tehran, Iran: kh_beakzadeh@yahoo.
Introduction Causation is a venerable subject in philosophical literature: on the one hand, it deals with the continuous realm of human knowledge, and on the other, it concerns arguments about scientific explanations and laws of nature.
According to this realistic approach, informed on the one hand by religious beliefs and, on the other hand, by Aristotle's philosophical principles, the following two features for the concept of causation are considered: (1) it is a rational and a priori concept; (2) effect and its perfect cause are inseparable.
He attempts to develop a theory of probabilistic models using statistical and causal mechanisms of the possible relationship between cause and effect, rather than posing any necessary alignment with the progress of the modern physical sciences.
Some philosophers have criticized Salmon’s account of physical connections and argue that, in many cases, there are such intuitive connections involved in causation but that these do not transfer energy: for instance, the following quote from Beebe (Dowe, 1996: 11) consider I may kill a plant if I fail to water it.
In contrast, on the ontological approach, metaphysical/ philosophical principles play an important role in explaining the objective world and reality (including the metaphysical meaning of causality and the necessity of cause and effect).